For the past few weeks, I have heard my younger sister ask the same thing in a panic nearly every day: “What should I study in college?” Though she still has one more year of high school, the pressure is getting to her fast. I remember being in the same position—I was in that position for over half of my time in college, in fact, until I finally decided to cast my lot with philosophy.
All throughout my time in college, I wanted something more than just a reliable path to work. I wanted to find something worth living and dying for. I rarely thought of what I’d do with my degree. Twice, I applied to do charity work after leaving school, only to turn back out of fear and doubt. Much like anyone that age, I wanted “something more,” whatever that means.
For a young student, it’s rare that this is just a practical choice. It’s about finding something to devote yourself to. This will be the center of your life. (Of course, this choice is rarely as confining as a young person thinks. There’s always an opportunity for change.) Choosing a line of study means choosing one narrow place to put all your young ambition. It’s easy for this to become a paralyzing decision.
It’s not enough to choose work that’s dignified and reliable. When the whole world still seems wide open, we want work that’s transformative and radical. We want work that can, in some way, change the world.
Eventually, it seems like this need dies down. More accurately, it starts to suffocate. The desire for purposeful work never goes away, but the rest of life gets in the way. You want to help others with your work, but you need to pay the bills, earn your benefits, and build your retirement portfolio. The desire to do something great never goes away, but it gets trapped under the everydayness of things.
It’s easy to understand this, especially when college is becoming an increasingly uncertain proposition. Young men with college degrees now have a higher unemploment rate than men their same age with no college experience. Students are running to graduate options like law school at a higher and higher rate with entry-level work drying up.
Ambition takes risks, and when there are fewer and fewer safety nets to fall back on, it’s hard to push for something more. It’s easy to feel like there’s a binary choice between fulfilling work and work that will keep you alive.
Cynically, we could paint college and young adulthood as the years-long process of getting this ambition beaten out of you. It’s about realizing that there are plenty of people who are every bit as smart and hard-working as you are. Grand ambitions to fix the world are nice, but there’s only so much that a normal person can do to fulfill these ambitions.
But is this the best way of looking at things? Does losing this focus mean giving up all your ambition, or can we find a concrete way to live out this purpose?
Perhaps the first mistake we make here is assuming that there’s an unbridgeable divide between great, meaningful work and “normal” work. We might think a meaningful job needs to be something spectacular: you need to be changing thousands of lives, getting recognition from cheering masses, or sacrificing everything for some personal passion.
Ironically, it might be this obsession with “meaningful” work that makes work so meaningless. What does it mean if you manage to earn a promotion or see an impact you’ve made when you think that your life can only be justified by its place in the history books? I know plenty of young men who spend their time thinking about how Alexander the Great or Orson Welles had already made some earth-shattering achievement before they were 25. If you set your measure for greatness at the world’s most important artists and leaders, how can anything you do compare?
In the process, your own achievements and successes start to seem irrelevant. A good friend of mine often complains to me that he’s never done anything in his life—meanwhile, before he’s turned 27, he’s already gotten two degrees, found solid work, and begun planning out the translation work he wants to devote himself to. The fact of the matter is that nothing is enough when you only care about the absolute peak.
In all of these cases, we’re left miserable when we compare ourselves to some ideal of greatness. We want to be everything to everyone—but failing at this means feeling like nobody at all.
Meaningful work isn’t some abstract theory that we’re looking to find. It starts in yourself, in learning who you are and where you belong. For all of us, the right way of living is determined by asking what narratives define our lives and what we must do to live out those stories well. To paraphrase the late Alasdair MacIntyre, I can only know what’s right for me to do when I know what stories I am a part of. (For those interested, this will be a key idea in our upcoming book, From Work to Vocation.)
Most often, we want work that changes the world because of a frustration with the limits of this story. We want to be part of everything instead of just part of one story. But, to quote David Foster Wallace, “Although of course you end up becoming yourself.”
Here’s my advice to any students still trying to figure out what you want to be: start by asking what sort of person you want to be, not what sort of work you want to do. What do you see as the most important things for living well? If you think about traits like courage, generosity, and honesty, ask yourself where you can live these out. It’s hard to predict exactly what you can and should do with your life. It’s much easier to say what kind of person you hope you’ll be throughout this.
We've taken vocation to mean one part of a whole fulfilled life. It’s not just about the work that you do, but about the person you need to be to live this out well.
I, for one, am still in the process of trying to figure out what I want to be when I grow up, and I don’t think I’m especially close to solving it. But I don’t think I need to know just what that will be. Right now, I need to know how I can live out these virtues and, in some small way, serve the good of the world in whatever I do.
Thanks for this. I’m guilty of this thinking pretty much everyday, where I feel that if nothing I do is “earth-shattering” or moving the needle dramatically enough, then it’s a waste or unworthy of pursuit. I’m slowly learning to give myself a break there and feeling less anxious as a result.
I once read a line proposing, 'everything that matters is at arm's length'. It is a simple idea with enormous scope.